When talking about God’s creation of the universe, we always talk of it’s perfection. The fact that God created a perfect universe is fundamental in the description from Genesis. If we examine the universe looking for evidence that God created it, then we should expect to find perfection. How can we do that? What is perfection?
When religious or theological scholars talk about perfection it is usually in it’s spiritual sense, but that is a different thing than what we are interested in right now. We aren’t discussing or debating the concepts of Christian perfection or spiritual perfection, we’re just discussing physical perfection. The perfection of the universe and it’s physical properties.
Archaeologists occasionally uncover things from antiquity that astound us. These artifacts might at first seem not to fit what we know about the abilities of the past cultures in which they are found. Scientists struggle to understand how they can exist because they seem too perfect for their time. Some people look at these items and say the technology of those past ages could not have made such a thing. Often they even say we wouldn’t be able to make such a thing even with modern technology. Sometimes this might be a piece of machinery, something for ancient navigation or astronomy. Such a thing is full of precision gears and small parts that make it work. Other times it will be something made of crystal that is so finely cut and polished that it seems beyond the capabilities of ancient man. The original assumption usually turns out to be wrong. The scientists measure it and study, and bit by bit they can piece together enough information to determine that it isn’t too perfect. They see how the design, while complex does have similarity to other things they know that culture had produced. They see how the finely cut and polished stones do have tool marks, and it does fit within the capabilities of the ancient peoples. They find that such things are not as perfect as they at first appeared. The artifacts just add to our knowledge of what those ancient cultures were able to do.
What is it about such things that make us think they were so perfect in the first place? It often comes down to being so complex a design or precision of manufacture. Even more perfect when it isn’t too overly complex for it’s function so the maker must have had great knowledge about how to solve the problem. An elegant design that can be broken down into simpler parts, but placed together in such a way to solve complex problems. Something in which it can’t be explained how it could have been manufactured by the culture that used it. Other times, it comes down to how fine is the craftsmanship. Did it leave tool marks as evidence of it’s manufacture. The less evidence of manufacture the more sense of perfection we see in it. The more complexity and less evidence of manufacture the more perfect it seems. Isn’t that what we find in the natural universe?
It seems that we tend to define perfection as something with a great deal of complexity, accomplished as simply as possible, and made with such precision it leaves very little, if any evidence of it’s manufacture. Another thing that is often associated with perfection is it’s completeness. The Latin roots of the word “perfect” even mean “to make”, and “complete”. The modern definition of “perfection” is more along the lines of, “to make complete and free of defects”, but as it can be applied to creation “defect” could simply mean leaving evidence of the creation. So from any of those explanations and definitions we could expect “a perfect universe” to mean God created an immensely complex universe that can be broken down into simpler processes, and so complete there is no evidence of it’s creation. That is pretty much what science finds whenever it looks at our universe. The universe certainly seems to be perfect then.
What about the past?
What would the perfect past be? According to our previous explanations of perfect, it would seem to be exactly whatever past is needed in order to result in the exact state of the present.
My original exploration of this idea started when I was an 8 year old little boy attending Sunday school. When the inevitable question about dinosaurs came up, the answer given was, “ the bones have been found so they must be real, which means God must have made them.” That answer initially led to the idea that God must have made all the evidence that scientists have found. The implication to me at the time was, that all the evidence must be what God wanted us to find to help us learn about the universe to understand the laws it operates by. As this idea grew from the seed of an idea in an 8 year old’s mind into the more philosophical thoughts of a teenager’s mind, at one point the concept reached the following idea about any evidence of the past:
A complete universe brought into existence at any point of time by supernatural means would be indistinguishable from a universe that had progressed from a natural origin to the same point in time.
That statement actually leads to a few different ways of looking at the past, that all then lead to the same place. Let’s examine that for a minute. The first thing that comes to mind is an outdated scientific theory called the Clock Work Universe. This is no longer believed to explain the universe as a whole because the effects of random chance preclude the precision of predetermination. It’s still a good theory to understand though because it simplifies the problem to something that can be examined. Until the theory of relativity, and the field of quantum mechanics came along with better explanations, the clock-work theory was the best explanation science had about the universe for many years.
A clockwork universe
Imagine a clock maker builds all the little gears and parts, and wheels for a chronometer that marks the days, months and years along with the seconds, minutes and hours of the clock. When he assembles the clock he sets the little wheels for the chronometer in the order to display the current date. Once he winds the clock it will keep accurate time and show the future dates as it ticks into the future. What if instead of winding the clock, we instead turn the hands counterclockwise? We would see the chronometer display past dates as far back as we wanted to keep turning the hands backwards.
The clockwork universe theory applies that same principle to physical reality. If you could some how form the universe with every bit of matter, energy and momentum in the proper place and set every thing in motion it would move into the future. If instead we could set everything in the reverse direction we could move it through every stage of the past. Where this theory runs into problems is from the effects of random chance and free choice. Heading into the past those effects can’t exist because their future is already determined by the present. Technically with the reversal of time into the past, all events are the result of the existence of the present. The model is still useful to demonstrate how the past and future can be seen as time flowing from a moment of creation. It can be seen how a perfect chronological past is expected as a result of the existence of any moment in time.
Does such a chronological past have to actually exist, or could any moment of a created universe just contain the complete evidence of such a past? That’s where the question becomes completely philosophical. The answer is that it wouldn’t matter. At that moment of creation; a universe in which the complete and perfect evidence of the past existed, would be indistinguishable from a universe in which the past had actually happened. When science studies the evidence of the universe; it doesn’t matter if the universe was supernaturally created, or if it had a completely natural origin. Either way the evidence would be identical. All the scientific discoveries and theories would be the same for the universe in either case.
Does time actually flow into the past from a supernatural creation then, or is the complete evidence of such a past only created at the moment of creation? It really depends on whether an entire time-line ever actually exists or if only single moments of time ever exist. A supernaturally created universe could probably have either kind of existence, but outside of an actual time machine being built there’s really no way determine which is correct in our own universe. In this book I always describe it as the time actually flowing into the past because it’s easier to envision all the evidence being created that way, but that’s just a literary convenience. All we can ever observe is the evidence in the present, so it really doesn’t matter which way you imagine it. The effective result would be the same for both.
